Director Chloé Zhao with Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal

I have a prejudice towards films about real people: it seems to me a trespass and condescension to assume you can portray the inner life of another person. It’s a bit ridiculous of me, and I frequently put it aside (quick check to see how many biographical films I have watched over the past couple of years). And – be reasonable – it’s not like everyone has the option to make autobiographical films like The Long Day Closes. Besides – Hamnet is a film with William Shakespeare, who surely sent Richard III spinning in his grave(s), and so little is known of his life – not to mention his wife’s – that there is fertile ground for speculation.

I enjoyed Zhao’s last film, and there were continuities with this one: strong female lead, nature, joy, kindness, hardship, dirt, earth. Agnes barely moves horizontally in this film (just once to London); her plane is vertical, from planting in the ground with her bare hands to soaring with her hawk. It’s a powerful film: I was a bit resistant to the obvious emotional wave of the acting and musical score at its height but it was undeniable. The attraction between Agnes and Will is immediate and practically wordless; of the two, she has the greater power of the spoken word with rhymes and chants learned from her mother and her own self-expression. The “great man” is often peripheral to the story, for this is seen through women’s eyes: Agnes and her mother-in-law are the protagonists here. (Lots of incidental ironies: if this had been made in Shakespeare’s time, they would have been played by men.) The modern dialogue and sensibility (which jarred slightly) are offset by the dirt and hardship of sixteenth-century life. Birth and death were definitely not anaesthetised or antiseptic.

I am ambivalent about it. My critical voice was on speakerphone while I watched it, telling me that it was too obvious in its emotional weight – but, on reflection, the themes of a woman’s life, family life, nature (the basics of any life, after all) and the transmutation of love and grief into a shared experience through art have stayed with me.